Fighting the Flames: North Dakota’s historic October wildfires, a mini-documentary

BISMARCK, N.D. (KFYR) – Historic wildfires severely impacted parts of North Dakota throughout October. Here is a look back at what caused them and the impact they had.

The majority of the fires broke out on Saturday, October 5, when a powerful cold front produced 60 to near 80 miles per hour wind gusts with very dry air.

The Bear Den Fire prompted an evacuation for a small portion of the Fort Berthold Reservation and came close to the community of Mandaree. The fire, which was fully contained on October 20, burned about 13,500 acres.

The Elkhorn Fire burned about 10,300 acres across rugged terrain south of Watford City and was contained after 11 days.

Williams County was the hardest hit, where two large fires each traveled approximately 20 miles, crossing Highway 2, and burning almost 90,000 acres, especially impacting the communities of Ray and Tioga.

Many other fires occurred across the state that first weekend of October, and as conditions remained dry, more popped up during the middle of the month. That included fires that burned more than a thousand acres north of Bismarck near Double Ditch and an approximately thousand-acre fire near Medora.

“The combination of a number of factors really led to the extreme severity of these wildfires back in October. A combination of long-term drought, and we had a high wind event on top of that, that not only was a high wind event, but we had gusts exceeding 70 miles per hour. And very low relative humidity combined with all of that, led to the extreme nature of this event,” said Chauncy Schultz, science and operations officer at the Bismarck National Weather Service. “So, we occasionally get high wind events in North Dakota, every year, right? But to actually get them in combination with drought-type conditions and with that really low relative humidity — the relative humidity back on that October day was actually down in the 20, 25-percent range. It’s rare to get relative humidity that low with winds that high in our part of the world just by the nature of how the weather patterns usually set up that drive those high wind events.”

“So, it’s really rare to actually get all of those conditions superimposed on top of each other, which is a good thing that it doesn’t happen very often, but obviously, extremely unfortunate when it does,” said Schultz.

“Fire season can be any time in North Dakota if these conditions align,” said Schultz. “We’ve had very large fires going back a few years in January, we’ve had fires in July and August that are really large as well. We’ve certainly had past falls where we’ve had fire seasons as well, and a lot of it has to do with if we have moisture in that August, September timeframe. If we have moisture there, a lot of times the fuels, the grasses will hold a little bit of that moisture until closer to when we actually get snowfall. This particular fall, of course, we didn’t have the moisture going in, and we had a protracted warm and dry fall — more opportunities to have these wind events on top of those dry, really drought-loaded types of fuels, which can lead to these sort of extreme conditions.”

These fires likely are the worst in North Dakota’s recorded history with more than 110,000 acres being impacted. The only event that comes close happened 25 years ago.

“The closest sort of analog that we would have is actually the Halloween 1999 wildfire outbreak, which had a lot of similarities to this one, including some really large fires in northeast Montana and western North Dakota that exceeded 20,000 acres and even greater than that,” said Schultz. “And that event also had high winds behind a cold front with relatively low relative humidity, and it also followed drought conditions — there were a lot of similarities. I think the difference maker between that event and this one that made this one even worse was that the winds were even a little bit higher. So, back in Halloween ‘99, the wind gusts were in that 60-65 mile per hour range. And with this event, the wind gusts exceeded 70 miles per hour and they stayed that high for a prolonged period of time.”

“Looking back at some of the data, we can see that the Williston area, for example, really hadn’t seen a half inch or more of precipitation in about 100 days leading up to that event,” said Schultz. “If we go back and look at the Halloween 1999 wildfire outbreak, it was very similar. It was around 100 days preceding that event where there had not been a half inch or more of precipitation, really speaking to those drought conditions. But the numbers actually line up very similarly, and we got pretty similar results. This event back in October was the more extreme of the two, but within the general realm, we can look at those patterns and I think that will help us in the future better anticipate hopefully and predict these sorts of things. And then we hope that we can prepare for them on the ground.”

Firefighters, the North Dakota National Guard, and many others came together to battle the blazes. Along the way, remarkable footage of their efforts was captured.

“Recognizing not only the dryness that was going on, but the weather events that were coming in, and how we were, unfortunately, setting ourselves up for potential disaster, which is unfortunately, of course, what happened in this particular case,” said Schultz.

“Speaking from some experience from myself, even though I was not involved with these fires, but being a firefighter in my personal time as well, the extreme nature of this, being able to try to do anything to try to stop these fires is basically impossible,” said Schultz. “So, you’re always for the next road and you’re hoping and praying that the winds go down. And so, it’s the extreme nature of these fires that makes them a safety hazard for all the fire crews as well. And you do your best to try to stop them, but the flames are just moving so fast that you’re really, really focused on protecting structures, protecting lives as best you can until you can sort of catch the fire.”

“The topography certainly makes it a challenge for firefighting, and the firefighters, the professionals even, and all the volunteers, which we have many of across the state, deal with that problem when we get in this sort of terrain,” said Schultz. “We have that in the western part of the state where some of these fires were burning, and that really does make it difficult to get to the fire to get water on it. Ultimately, you need to get water on it or you need to build a fire break, and in a lot of these cases, they had to build fire lines or fire breaks to try to slow down the fires or stop them because of, in part, the terrain, and, of course, the wind on that October 5 day as well.”

“We were seeing 75-foot flame lengths with 60-mile-per-hour winds. Just too extreme to be close to the fire,” said Marle Baker, the fire management officer for the Three Affiliated Tribes and fire chief for Mandaree.

“That’s pretty hard to hear. You just start packing the things up. It was very emotional,” said Vawnita Best, who lives southeast of Watford City.

Remembering Johannes Nicolass Van Eden and Edgar Coppersmith who died during the fires

“My heart needed to do something more to help our community,” said Lyda Jade Spotted Bear, a Mandaree resident. “I’m proud to be from this community. And any little thing that happens, we do, we come together a lot.”

“Extremely humbling to see what this community is doing to help us,” said Baker.

“This is the best of America right here. This is where neighbors still help neighbors,” said North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum.

“I know people come together for stuff like this in times of need, but it is shocking to see everybody,” said Kelci Hanson, a Tioga resident who organized a benefit auction in support of families who were most impacted by the Williams County wildfires.

“Our fellow firefighters who dropped everything that they were doing on a Saturday to come to help us save our town,” said Ray Fire Chief Kyle Weyrauch.

“We will get these kinds of conditions again someday, hopefully not anytime soon, but odds are that sometime over the next 50 years, it’s going to happen where we’ll have these sort of weather conditions again,” said Schultz. “So, an awareness of how you can take protective actions to maybe protect your property, raise awareness for those sorts of things is important going forward. We look at the meteorology of these conditions, we collaborate with fire management officials, fire officials within the state, to try and detect things like this earlier so that we can have advanced warnings — Red Flag Warnings, and things like that — that maybe can help identify these. So, we can learn from the unfortunate set of events that happened from this one to hopefully better prepare and better predict for the next one.”

Copyright 2024 KFYR. All rights reserved.